Thoughts from the interface of science, religion, law and culture

After spending several years touring the country as a stand up comedian, Ed Brayton tired of explaining his jokes to small groups of dazed illiterates and turned to writing as the most common outlet for the voices in his head. He has appeared on the Rachel Maddow Show and the Thom Hartmann Show, and is almost certain that he is the only person ever to make fun of Chuck Norris on C-SPAN.

Science blogs

EVENTS

Ted Cruz Birthers, Where Are You?

Newly elected Sen. Ted Cruz is already being mentioned as a potential Republican presidential nominee, but he was actually born in Canada. But a Liberty University law professor, writing at Breitbart.com, says that he’s still eligible to be president:

Cameron was referring to the Constitution’s Article II requirement that only a “natural born citizen” can run for the White House.

No one is certain what that means. Citizenship was primarily defined by each state when the Constitution was adopted. Federal citizenship wasn’t clearly established until the Fourteenth Amendment was ratified in 1868. The Constitution is not clear whether it means you must be born on U.S. soil, or instead whether you must be born a U.S. citizen.

Cruz was born in Canada, but his mother was a lifelong American, born in Delaware. (His father was a political refugee from Cuba.) So under federal law, Cruz was born an American citizen by virtue of his mother…

The most likely meaning of the national-born clause is that you must have been an American citizen at birth, so that you would not have greater loyalty to some foreign nation. Cruz was born an American citizen, and has spent most of his life serving this nation with unabashed patriotism.

But this puts him at odds with other Christian right legal types like Herb Titus, at least when it comes to Obama (if Cruz is eligible, so is Obama). And with a lot of people who routinely cite Klukowski’s anti-Obama book as well. And I did a quick Google search and couldn’t find anywhere that Klukowski ever spoke out against those who claim Obama isn’t eligible to be president.

I think the Republicans here in the state are already having buyers remorse about sending him to Washington. Though it would be funny watching him run through the wackaloon right talking points on national television while whatever well respected journalist is moderating tried not to laugh.

PLEASE tell me the Repubs are going to have Cruz in the running: it would be like a breath of Rick Perry flavored air, another indicator of rock bottom extremism that everyone would have to match to garner the “vote of the base”…

Wait a second, Mr. Potato Head. Are you saying it’s OK to question whether someone running for President is actually eligible according to the rule of law? When did you get so scrupulous? Why are you holding people to a standard that you reject?

Idiot. If you went on a diet and lost all the fat in your bloated body, there’d be a vacuum between your ears.

Idiot. If you went on a diet and lost all the fat in your bloated body, there’d be a vacuum between your ears.

Oh, look what just crawled out from under a rock.

A birther!!! LOL.

Sounds like the Chemtrails have got to him. Candiron, aren’t you worried the Trilateral comminsion/Illuminati are going to put you in a FEMA concentration camp under UN Agenda 21 for refusing to get vaccinated?

President Cruz would at least keep our golf courses safe the the UN’s black helicopters.

Cruz is a natural born citizen because he holds the views of Real Americans ™.

Honestly, I doubt he or Marco Rubio will get the nomination in 2016. They may be useful in trying to repackage the same stale ideas to Latinos (not really), but when it comes to casting a primary ballot, I don’t the rank and file republicans are ready for that. They were barely ready to nominate a white bread Mormon. There will be at least one old white guy in the GOP primary race and given the choice, I’ll bet most republicans will pick the old white guy over the middle aged Latino any day.

@raven (#6): FEMA concentration camps aren’t really that much of a paranoid stretch. We’ve previously established ‘mass-quarantine’ camps in USA, and not all that long ago (well, WWII – YMMV on whether that’s a long time ago); while they nominally existed to prevent the spread of “venereal disease”, they were functionally dedicated to sequestering and resocializing visibly-sexual young women (particularly, though by no means exclusively, sex workers), especially those who were not White or not married. More famously, we established concentration camps for Japanese-Americans during the same period, and throughout the past fifty years we’ve sequestered refugees of uncertain legal status in conditions approaching those of prison camps (not to mention our official prison-industrial system). The eugenics craze and mass-anthropometry coupled with mass-sterilization programs for ‘undesirables’ got its start in the USA in the early 1900s; the Nazis were largely copying successful models of eugenic practice and population management from us when they implemented their Final Solution. Worrying about something for which there is a repeated historical (and arguably contemporary) precedent doesn’t strike me as particularly delusional.

Candiron provides a lovely example of the reading and comprehension capabilities of the average Republican supporter. Anything, no matter how simply laid out, can and must be twisted to support the extreme conservative viewpoint.

I love the Rovian “I am unable to defend my party, so instead I’ll turn this into an argument about what Ed believes!”

The original article doesn’t explain why the Cruz family was in Canada at the time of Ted’s birth, and what their relations with the United States and Canada were, which could be significant. Were they tourists with unusually bad timing? Obviously, the child of U.S. military or diplomatic personnel, themselves citiznes, stationed abroad would be natural-born American citizens. That explains John McCain. During Lowell Weicker’s brief run for the Presidency, I believe it came up that he was born abroad, but that his family was abroad because his citizen father was working in a foreign branch office of an American company at the time. Probably also OK. But if someone wants to opine on the subject, he should explain the basic facts– or explain why he need not. It may be his view that the child of an American citizen, wherever born, is a natural-born citizen, period. If so, he should say so.

There’s a difference between checking that a candidate meets the eligibility requirements and continuously denying that proof of birth has already been established beyond a reasonable (and many unreasonable) doubt.

I remember the push rethuglicans made to allow for foreign born nationals to be eligible for pres when there was even the remotest possibility that Schwarzenegger would run for pres.

anyone who thinks that there was ever even the remotest legal argument behind the Obama birth issue is blind, dumb, and ignorant.

this, aside from the actual pure liars pushing the argument who know better, who I imagine would have a large overlap with those pushing for actually amending the fucking constitution when one of their own was thinking of running.

so… candyland… which one are you? liar, or dumb, blind, and ignorant?

judging by the “YOU’RE FAT!” comment, I have to lean towards the latter.